Debugging a Remote ArgoCD Environment

In this guide, we will describe how to debug a remote ArgoCD environment with Telepresence.

Telepresence allows you to connect & debug a service deployed in a remote environment and to “cherry-pick” one service to run locally, staying connected to the remote cluster. This will:

• Reduce resource footprint on the local machine
• Decrease the feedback loop time
• Result in more confidence about the delivered code.

To read more about it, refer to the official documentation at telepresence.io or Medium.

Install ArgoCD

First of all, install ArgoCD on your cluster

kubectl create ns argocd
curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml | kubectl apply -n argocd -f -

Connect

Connect to one of the services, for example, to debug the main ArgoCD server run:

kubectl config set-context --current --namespace argocd
telepresence helm install # Installs telepresence into your cluster
telepresence connect # Starts the connection to your cluster (bound to the current namespace)
telepresence intercept argocd-server --port 8080:http --env-file .envrc.remote # Starts the interception

• --port forwards traffic of remote port http to 8080 locally (use --port 8080:https if argocd-server terminates TLS)
• --env-file writes all the environment variables of the remote pod into a local file, the variables are also set on the subprocess of the --run command

With this, any traffic that hits your argocd-server service in the cluster (e.g. through a LB / ingress) will be forwarded to your laptop on port 8080. So that you can now start argocd-server locally to debug or test new code. If you launch argocd-server using the environment variables in .envrc.remote, it is able to fetch all the configmaps, secrets and so on from the cluster and transparently connect to the other microservices so that no further configuration should be necessary, and it behaves exactly the same as in the cluster.

List current status of Telepresence using:

telepresence status

Stop the intercept using:

telepresence leave argocd-server-argocd

And uninstall telepresence from your cluster:

telepresence helm uninstall

See this quickstart for more information on how to intercept services using Telepresence.

Connect (telepresence v1)

Use the following command instead:

telepresence --swap-deployment argocd-server --namespace argocd --env-file .envrc.remote --expose 8080:8080 --expose 8083:8083 --run bash

• --swap-deployment changes the argocd-server deployment
• --expose forwards traffic of remote ports 8080 and 8083 to the same ports locally
• --env-file writes all the environment variables of the remote pod into a local file, the variables are also set on the subprocess of the --run command
• --run defines which command to run once a connection is established, use bash, zsh or others

Debug

Once a connection is established, use your favorite tools to start the server locally.

Terminal

• Compile make server
• Run ./dist/argocd-server

VSCode

In VSCode use the following launch configuration to run argocd-server:

        {
            "name": "Launch argocd-server",
            "type": "go",
            "request": "launch",
            "mode": "auto",
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}/cmd/main.go",
            "envFile": [
                "${workspaceFolder}/.envrc.remote",
            ],
            "env": {
                "ARGOCD_BINARY_NAME": "argocd-server",
                "CGO_ENABLED": "0",
                "KUBECONFIG": "/path/to/kube/config"
            }
        }